Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919, by Erik Grimmer-Solem

How influential is academic scholarship?While many of us may strive to produce socially relevant work with a modest degree of 'impact', Erik Grimmer-Solem's book focuses on a small group of scholars in Wilhelmine Germany who, it seems, greatly influenced German global politics up to and including the First World War.The book links the individual stories of these middleclass political economists with the 'high politics' of the likes of Tirpitz, Bülow, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German foreign office (p.21), demonstrating the remarkable salience of liberal imperial thought from the late nineteenth century through the First World War.Grimmer-Solem thus joins recent scholars in taking on the Fischer school, whose advocates have long claimed that a nationalist quest for Weltmacht and expansion rooted in Imperial Germany was responsible for the First World War as much as the Second.The author's aim is ambitiously formulated: 'a novel retelling of the entire history of the German Empire from a simultaneously local prosopographical and global perspective' (p.24).A tall order, indeed.Although Grimmer-Solem alludes in his introduction to the role of the German university 'as a node of global connection that brought the world to Germany' (p.7), this study is really more about a group of individuals and their personal and scholarly networks than the actual institutions in which they were embedded.It thus resonates with recent work on intellectual networks and empire, and particularly with Tamson Pietsch's Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850World, -1939World, (2013)).It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the German academic world, at the same time demonstrating its global entanglements.The book is organised into three parts, moving chronologically from ' Absent-Minded Empire, 1875-1897', through 'Empire Imagined, 1897-1907', to 'Empire Lost, 1908-1919'.A total of twelve chapters interweave developments in the lives of the main subjects with major domestic and foreign policy debates.Drawing largely on unpublished or under-used personal papers and accounts as well as an impressive array of secondary literature, Grimmer-Solem takes us on the intellectual and geographical journeys of six scholars, all of whom studied under the economist Gustav Schmoller.We travel with Ernst von Halle to the United States in 1893-4, with Karl Rathgen to Korea, China and Japan in 1886 and 1890, and later to the American South, the Caribbean, Panama and Honduras.We accompany Hermann Schumacher to the US and Cuba in 1907 and to Malaya, Java and Sumatra in 1911.We trace Max Sering's route through the US and Canada in 1883 and track the connections Karl Helfferich made in Cairo.We witness how the American Henry Farnam, having studied in Germany, continued to facilitate intellectual exchange between the two countries until the outbreak of the First World War, when he was just about to begin an academic exchange in Berlin.

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